Burner + Slack = Accessible SMS for the whole team

It seems like everybody’s talking Slack these days. The collaboration tool is exploding with popularity for good reason–it’s a great way to communicate with your peers in real time, without drowning in email. And best of all, it can connect to many other applications that are likely to be in your company’s toolset or personal productivity stack.

Now you can finally add your phone number to that list.

Burner’s new Slack Connection lets you connect a Burner line to any channel in Slack, routing incoming messages to the team, and enabling anyone in the channel to respond and to see others’ responses. We set one up for public comments and questions about Connections, and voilà–anyone with a phone number can reach us where we live, and the whole team can watch the threads and collaborate on how we reply. Magic!

In the dialog, pick one of your team's public channels, or Slackbot, to associate with your Burner.

Give out the Burner number to people you want to communicate with in your Slack team. When someone texts that number, the Burner Bot will post a message to the channel that includes the sender's phone number and the contents of the message, including images. Any voicemails left on the line will also be posted to the channel.

You can respond back using the Burner slash command (/burner).

With the format /burner last [message], you can quickly reply to the sender of the last inbound text message.

Finally, you can start a brand new conversation with anyone using the format /burner +13334445555 [message].

Want more detail? Send a text or leave a voicemail at (310) 919-5060. Your message will reach the Burner team directly in Slack, and we'll be able to reply to you, too. Please feel free to ask us questions, share feedback or ideas for Connections, tell us knock-knock jokes, or just "Hello world" us. Picture us battling it out for who gets to answer. This integration is fun!

We're excited to see what happens when the footprint of Slack interactions is extended to anyone with a phone number. More generally, we think it's about time our phone numbers can talk to the rest of our software stack.